Blades

NICOLE BLADES AND NATASHA KONG, Cofounders SheNetworks

by Peg Townsend

Their lives were as different as the sun and the moon.

Nicole Blades grew up in a noisy, laughing family.

Natasha Kong was an only child who spent a lot of time alone.

Blades loved college, graduating with honors in mass communication and psychology.

Kong hated the university and dropped out after one year.

Blades became a writer.

Kong became an artist.

Then one day in 1998, their orbits intersected.

It was a chance meeting, a moment that could have just as easily not happened.

If Blades' resume hadn't needed a little punch.

If Kong hadn't decided to stay late at the graphic design company she had founded in downtown Toronto.

"I remember looking through her resume," says Kong of the petite, dreadlocked young woman who had walked through the door. "She had a really strong editorial background."

"We just clicked," says Blades of the woman with the distinctive tattoo on her left shoulder and dark, almond-shaped eyes.

"When I left I said to a mutual friend, 'I'm going to work with that woman,'" Blades says.

It was a moment that changed their lives.

Today, Blades and Kong walk the same path as co-founders of SheNetworks, a website that that is part magazine and part community for women in their 20s. They are women who sometimes finish each other's sentences; who live on separate coasts but are as close as sisters. They are friends who believe in hard work and they also are business partners who, in their 20s, were fearless enough to go out and raise capital for a dream that many people said wouldn't work.

"I've been blessed by being able to recognize good things and good people when they cross your path," Blades says.

This crossing, they both agree, was definitely a good thing.

Kong grew up in Vancouver, the daughter of a Jamaican father and a mother who came to Canada from Hong Kong. She was an introspective child, who played with used toys and wore hand-me-downs. Her favorite games were playing dress-up with a box of old clothes and drawing in her little sketchbook, she says.

By the time, she was 10, she was performing in a theater group.

By the time she was 14, she was appearing in television shows: a spot on the adventure show "MacGyver," and the show "Black Stallion."

But she didn't like television.

"There were big egos and lots of different strange hierarchies," says Kong, from her office with its view of downtown Toronto. "Stars were treated like gold, while the extras were treated like dirt."

So, she got a scholarship to study at University of Vancouver, but found herself living in a damp basement apartment furnished with an old hospital bed she bought for $10 and lawn furniture. At night, spiders would drop from the ceiling on to her head.

Working in a shoe store to support herself, Kong was miserable.

Her parents had pushed her in two different directions, Kong says. Her father wanted her to go to college. Her mother wanted her to be a Hollywood star.

She had tried both and neither made her happy.

"Basically, I decided to follow my own path and stop listening to what people told me was good for me," says the woman with fashionably streaked, chin-length hair.

Dressed in jeans and white T-shirt, she tells about the day that changed her life: the day she bought a Macintosh computer.

Living in Toronto, friends gave her some art software for her computer and soon, she began to fall in love with what a technology could do; how it took a fine artist's tools and put them into a digital medium. She began to teach herself graphic design and offering to do work for free as a learning tool.

Walking down the street with her boyfriend one day, they bumped into her boyfriend's ex-landlord and found out his $7-million investment services company was looking for someone to design a presentation for it. Before she could protest, Kong's boyfriend had said Kong was the one to do the work for him.

Two days later in the atrium of her little apartment, Kong showed the businessmen her ideas.

She won a three-year contract and her design company, Random Media Core was born.

It's a lesson Kong learned early and one she tells other women: networking is important, meeting people is key.

"Keep every business card you ever get. You never know when you may meet up with someone or call on someone later down the road," she says.

Just like the day she met Blades.

In her open work/live space in San Francisco's Fillmore District, Blades' words are almost identical.

"Everything in my life has been about knowing the right person," she says.

It's what has made everything click.

Working first in public relations for the Sally Jesse Raphael talk show, Blades was impatient to move into something else besides the world of television.

"Sally's stylist told me I really ought to talk to Terrie Williams," Blades says of the hip public relations agency with clients like Miles Davis and Eddie Murphy.

So Blades did and landed herself a job that eventually put her in touch with Essence magazine.

Soon, Blades was working for the top culture and fashion magazine aimed at African-American woman.

"It was great. I was interviewing lots of amazing people and learning a lot about the trade," says Blades, who is dressed in a stylish black skirt, black shirt and wild red shoes.

"But then it felt like I hit a ceiling at Essence."

So she used her connections to move on, first to do newspaper work in New York, then to Barbados, her parents' homeland, where she got a job with The Nation newspaper. When the pace of the Caribbean got too slow, she moved to Toronto and met Kong.

Three weeks after their meeting, their partnership was born. They launched SheBytes, a women and technology e-zine.

"Natasha was doing all the design and I was doing all the writing," says Blades of those first months.

"We were working seven days a week, 100-hour weeks," Kong says. "For the first couple of months we were doing freelance stuff on the side to earn money to put toward SheBytes."

"People thought it was a much bigger organization than it was," Blades says with a laugh.

Sitting around late one night after a long day of work, the two women got to talking like friends often do.

"I don't read magazines, do you?" Kong asked Blades.

"They're crap," Blades agreed.

As they talked, the ideas began to flow.

They were sick of magazines that told you how lose the same 10 pounds, how to please a man, how to gold leaf your mantle, they said. They were tired of women-focused websites aimed at women in their 30s and 40s. They wanted meatier, meaningful information that related to their lives - the lives of intelligent, fashionable, busy twentysomethings.

SheNetworks was born.

With Kong doing all the graphics and Blades doing writing and editing, the web-zine took off. With its 12 different sites - SheFit, SheTravels, SheWears, SheViews and SheBytes for instance - it caters to women who care more about dealing with lifestyle and career choices, than losing 10 pounds and packing school lunches.

Its readers, say the two women, are interesting, independent, driven, fashionable and worldly. Their interests are varied.

The formula worked. SheNetworks has 80,000 page views a month.

And while Kong and Blades are still designer and writer at heart, they also have become business managers, marketing directors, venture capital raisers and visionaries.

"I do think that good things happen to people who work hard, persevere, take risks, are open to new things, help others and are willing to take on a challenge," Kong says.

"I agree with Natasha," Blades says. "I think you create opportunities for yourself."

Believing in yourself, keeping your vision when others say you are wrong and working hard, is what makes SheNetworks work, they say.

"Don't follow," Blades says. "Lead.

"For every idea that was ever thought up, there was someone saying it can't be done, or it was a dumb idea.

"Believe," she says.

Now 28 and 26, Blades and Kong are pushing to the edge, building an Internet magazine from the ground up.

And what about that resume Blades wanted done?

It looked great, Blades says, but she never sent it out.

A FEW MORE MINUTES WITH NICOLE BLADES AND NATASHA KONG

What is your definition of success?

KONG: Overcoming something you fear

BLADES: Doing and living on your own terms.

What new technology do you believe will have the most positive impact on the world in the next 20 years.

KONG: I still think that email and instant messaging has had a very positive impact on the world. It crosses boundaries, time zones, has brought people closer and continues to connect one side of the world to the other.

BLADES: I also think email is it. Also, the rapid advancements in wireless communications will have a remarkable impact.

If you were to chose a different profession what would it be?

KONG: Genetics

Blades: Psychology.